Jingo (Discworld, #21; City Watch, #4)

by Terry Pratchett

Some of them even became curious—very briefly curious—about the sharp barbed thing that was coming very quickly toward them. The Curious Squid were extremely curious. Unfortunately, they weren’t very good at making connections.

The Curious Squid were very small, harmless, difficult to find and reckoned by connoisseurs to have the foulest taste of any creature in the world. This made them very much in demand in a certain kind of restaurant where highly skilled chefs made, with great care, dishes containing no trace of the squid whatsoever.

“My curvy sword at your neck, you unclean son of a dog of the female persuasion!”

Detritus’s intelligence wasn’t too bad for a troll, falling somewhere between a cuttlefish and a line-dancer, but you could rely on him not to let it slow him down.

“Why are our people going out there?” said Mr. Boggis of the Thieves’ Guild. “Because they are showing a brisk pioneering spirit and seeking wealth and . . . additional wealth in a new land,” said Lord Vetinari. “What’s in it for the Klatchians?” said Lord Downey. “Oh, they’ve gone out there because they are a bunch of unprincipled opportunists always ready to grab something for nothing,” said Lord Vetinari. “A masterly summation, if I may say so, my lord,” said Mr. Burleigh, who felt he had some ground to make up. The Patrician looked down again at his notes. “Oh, I do beg your pardon,” he said, “I seem to have read those last two sentences in the wrong order . . . Mr. Slant, I believe you have something to say here?”

“A really greasy piece of work—” Lord Rust whispered to Mr. Boggis, in that special aristocratic whisper that carries to the rafters. “It’s an insult to send him here!”

Sergeant Colon had had a broad education. He’d been to the School of My Dad Always Said, the College of It Stands to Reason, and was now a postgraduate student at the University of What Some Bloke In the Pub Told Me.

Friends would have called him a quiet sort who kept himself to himself, but they didn’t because he didn’t have any friends.

He’d enjoyed it immensely, too. It wasn’t just the pursuit that was so invigorating, with his velvet cloak left behind on a tree and his hat in a puddle somewhere, it was the knowledge that while he was doing this he wasn’t eating very small sandwiches and making even smaller talk. It wasn’t proper police work, Vimes considered, unless you were doing something that someone somewhere would much rather you weren’t doing.

Their bodies wore feathers and silks, but their minds persistently wore suits.

You looked into them and several layers of person looked back at you.

All in all, the man had a face that any policeman would arrest on sight. There was no possible way it could be innocent of anything.

Vimes realized he was staring when he ought to have been making polite diplomatic conversation. “So,” he said, “are we going to have a scrap over this Leshp business or what?”

in a style that went out of fashion, by the look of it, at the time when flint was at the cutting edge of cutting-edge technology,

It was an almost Pavlovian response.*

After all, this was a Traditional Ceremony. If you took the view that you were not going to do things because they were apparently ridiculous, you might as well go home right now.

“However, some people might consider them to be unimaginative, stolid and . . . how can I put this? . . . possessed of an inbuilt disposition to accept the first explanation that presents itself and then bunk off somewhere for a quiet smoke? A certain lack of imagination? An ability to get out of their depth on a wet pavement? A tendency to rush to judgment?”

“I believe it could replace the horse,” said Leonard proudly. They looked at the stricken thing. “One of the advantages of horses that people often point out,” said Vetinari, after some thought, “is that they very seldom explode. Almost never, in my experience, apart from that unfortunate occurrence in the hot summer a few years ago.”

It was the seat and soul of that force which, down the millennia, had caused mankind to stick its fingers in the electric light socket of the Universe and play with the switch to see what happened—and then be very surprised when it did.

he had a world view about as complex as that of a concussed duckling

After all, when you seek advice from someone it’s certainly not because you want them to give it. You just want them to be there while you talk to yourself.

The woman within had one of those faces that had settled over the years, as though it had been made of butter and then left in the sun.

It was locked, but the cheap metal gave way when he accidentally levered at the lid.

“Carrot, these disguises are meant for a potato.” “Are they?” “Look, they’re all on potatoes, see?” “I thought that was just for display.” “Carrot, it’s got ‘Mr. Spuddy Face’ on it.”

“Good evening to you, Spuddy,” said the Dean, and ambled off into the night. “You see?” “Ah, but he didn’t call me Carrot,” said Carrot. “The principle is sound.”

“Ook eek ook?” “Er . . .” “What did he say?” said Angua. “If you must know, he said, ‘My goodness me, a walking potato,’” said Carrot.

“Was that ‘How may I be of assistance, Captain Tuber?’”

“Ook oook—ook.” “He says that’s just old storerooms,” said Carrot. “And that last ‘ook’?” said Angua. “‘Mr. Horrible Hat,’” said Carrot. “Still, he hasn’t worked out who you are, eh?” said Angua.

“‘Chapter Fifteen, Elementary Necromancy,’” she read aloud. “‘Lesson One: Correct Use of Shovel . . . ’”

“And Mr. Gorriff comes from Elharib, and the two countries only stopped fighting ten years ago. Religious differences.” “Run out of weapons?” said Vimes. “Ran out of rocks, sir. They ran out of weapons last century.”

Already old Fred’s face was creasing up in the soft expression of someone who has been mugged in Memory Lane.

It was much better to imagine men in some smoky room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over the brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn’t then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told their children bedtime stories, were capable of then going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people. It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault. If it was Us, what did that make Me? After all, I’m one of Us. I must be. I’ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We’re always one of Us. It’s Them that do the bad things.

“Tell me, sergeant, are you of a nautical persuasion?” Colon saluted again. “Nossir! Happily married man, sir!” “I meant, have you ploughed the ocean waves at all?” Colon gave him a cunning look. “Ah, you can’t catch me with that one, sir,” he said. “Everyone knows the horses would sink.”

“It is always useful to face an enemy who is prepared to die for his country,” he read. “This means that both you and he have exactly the same aim in mind.”

Odd thing, ain’t it . . . you meet people one at a time, they seem decent, they got brains that work, and then they get together and you hear the voice of the people. And it snarls.”

“What ships have we commandeered?” said Rust. “There’s more than twenty now, if you include the Indestructible, the Indolence and the . . .” Lieutenant Hornett looked at his list again, “. . . and the Prid of Ankh-Morpork, sir.” “The Prid?” “I’m afraid so, sir.”

“Are we entirely ready, sir?” said Lieutenant Hornett, with the special inflection that means “We are not entirely ready, sir.”

Theft was the only crime, whether the loot was gold, innocence, land or life.

Vetinari’s terrier, eh?

It is language of . . . merchant.” He put an inflection on the word that suggested it was the same as “earthworm.”

Lose your dignity, it said; of all the things you’ve got, it’s the one you can most afford to lose.

En al Sams la Laisa,”

“Can you think of any reason why I should go around with an inflatable donkey?” “Well, you—” “One that you wouldn’t mind explaining to your own dear mother?” “If you’re going to put it like that—”

The man had a point. The man had a whole sword.

Somewhere out there was the Ankh-Morpork army, what there was of it. And somewhere waiting was the Klatchian army. And thousands of men who might have quite liked one another had they met socially would thunder toward one another and start killing, and after that first rush you had all the excuses you needed to do it again and again . . .

“I’m not a natural killer! See this? See what it says? I’m supposed to keep the peace, I am! If I kill people to do it, I’m reading the wrong manual!”

He believed, along with General Tacticus, that courage, bravery and the indomitable human spirit were fine things which nevertheless tended to take second place to the combination of courage, bravery, the indomitable human spirit and a six-to-one superiority of numbers.

“And I promise you this,” he shouted, “if we succeed, no one will remember. And if we fail, no one will forget!” Probably one of the worst rallying cries, Vimes thought, since General Pidley’s famous “Let’s all get our throats cut, boys!” but it got a huge cheer.

“Used my sexual wiles on him, sir.” Vimes’s kebab stopped halfway to his mouth and dripped lamb fat on to his legs. He saw Angua’s eyes slam open and stare in horror at the sky. “I told him I’d take my clothes off and scream if he didn’t give me some grub, sir.” “That’d scare the daylights out of me, sure enough,” said Vimes. He saw Angua breathe out again.

“A brain race, sort of,” said Vimes. “Better than an arms race. Cheaper, too,” said the Patrician.